IQNA

TEHRAN (IQNA) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the United States’ largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said that its Washington, DC, headquarters has received a racist, Islamophobic letter sent from Michigan portraying former President Obama as a monkey and containing a page from an English translation of the Quran smeared with a "foreign substance".

The letter, which had an apparently fake return address,
will be turned over to law enforcement authorities.

"This is just a sample of the hate targeting American
Muslims and other minority groups in the wake of the presidential
election," said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad. "These
bigoted acts will never stop us from defending the civil rights and religious
freedom of all Americans."

CAIR recently called for hate crime investigations of
bias-motivated incidents targeting Muslims in Wisconsin and Texas, part of
"almost daily" attacks on American Muslims and other minority groups
nationwide in recent months.

The Washington-based civil rights organization also decried
what it termed US President Donald Trump administration's "deafening
silence" on a growing number of anti-Muslim incidents in recent days, part
of a trend that began during the recent presidential campaign and accelerated
following the November 8 election.

Since the beginning of the year, CAIR has called for
investigations of possible bias motives for 35 incidents targeting mosques in
Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, Georgia, Arizona, Virginia, New
Jersey, New York, Maryland, Texas, and a number of other states. By comparison,
in the January-March period in 2016, CAIR recorded 19 such incidents.

In a soon-to-be-published report, CAIR will detail a more
than 50 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents in 2016 over 2015. That
figure is accompanied by a more than 40 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate
crimes in the same period.

CAIR is asking American Muslims and Islamic institutions to
take extra security precautions and is offering Muslim community leaders free
copies of its booklet, "Best Practices for Mosque and Community
Safety."